One Shot Story – Resilience

The year is 1938.  It is 9 years into the Great Depression and my grandparents were a young couple with 3 children.  Neither came from families that could offer anything in the way of support to them.  My grandfather came over to the US at the age of two, brought over by an uncle that raised him after his mother died and father could not care for him.  My grandmother was raised in a shack that could only be reached by a path into the woods.  As a young girl, school truancy officials came to find out why the children in my grandmother’s family were not in school.  They found that the family was so poor, they couldn’t afford shoes for the kids.

In the photo below, my grandmother would have been 24 years old.  She has 3 children and the shack in the background was their home.  It was a meager existence by any measure, but they were determined to make a better life for their family.  The concrete blocks that are piled in the yard would form for the foundation of the house that my grandfather built for his family.  He had no power tools, so everything that was needed to build the house was done by hand.  Every board cut, and every hole drilled would be done with hand tools.  The foundation would be dug by hand with shovels.  The foundation would be built, surrounding the wooden shack. When the roof of the new house was finished, the shack inside was dismantled.  As a kid, when in the basement of their house, you could see the sloppy brickwork in a corner where the wall of the shack blocked the nice finish seen in the rest of the foundation.  First, it was a concrete block house.  Then, my grandfather added a second story to add space as the family grew.  In the 1940s, he added another level to add two more bedrooms as even more space was needed.  It would eventually form a nice 3 bedroom home of 2 stories over the block foundation.  But, this is where it began though.

The house still exists today as a nice little house on the side of a hill just outside of Pittsburgh, PA, USA.  It’s a happy time in the photograph.  They have obtained the concrete block that would form the foundation of the family home for the next 50 years.  In this photo, my grandmother is on the right.  My mother, aunt and uncle are the children to the left of her. An unidentified uncle and cousin of my mother is on the left side of the photo.

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